Got a Degree and an Idea? Go to China

America is not the only great power struggling with how to handle the future of foreigners in its midst. As the Supreme Court indicated in its mixed decision Monday on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, the question of how we regard those who arrive on our shores has both philosophical and practical components. The philosophical argument in favor of immigration is, of course, what my colleague Steve Coll describes in Comment this week, as “America’s foundational narrative”—the notion that the unique American advantage is our commitment to absorb the best brains and ideas from abroad. But, these days, that conviction runs into versions of a less soaring, if ostensibly practical, assertion, along the lines that “we already have a domestic work force that has the same skills,” as one advocate for reduced immigration put it in the Times yesterday. (That argument, incidentally, is not well-served by a new study that confirms what every globally minded executive will tell you: the future of American innovation depends substantially on our openness to foreigners because immigrants play a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities.

In China, immigration poses new questions, and the philosophical and practical pressures are very different. For centuries, it was not an issue: beset by poverty and upheaval, the Chinese were the ones headed abroad, and hardly anyone was showing up looking for shelter. Now that the tables have turned, the legal infrastructure is lacking. As recently as the mid-eighties, foreigners registered in Beijing were not permitted to leave a radius of twenty kilometers from Tiananmen Square, without permission, according to China Daily. Foreigners only gained the legal right to stay freely in Chinese households less than a decade ago. In a nation of 1.3 billion, foreigners were such an afterthought that they were only formally counted for the first time in the census two years ago. The notion of giving foreigners “permanent residence” was so out of step with the Chinese view of Chineseness, that by 2009, only three hundred and eleven people in Beijing had earned the right to permanent residence.

It is no longer an abstract issue. Last week, a hundred or so African migrants in the city of Guangzhou staged an angry protest after an African man died following a fight with a local bicycle-taxi driver about a fare. Much about it is unclear—did he die at the hands of a crowd, or in police custody?—but the effect was clear: protesters ended up hurling bricks at police cars and other vehicles, demanding the body of the deceased, while some neighborhood residents shouted, “Guangzhou doesn’t welcome you. Go back home.”

There was more to this than a taxi-fare dispute. The Africans in Guangzhou constitute perhaps the single largest foreign enclave in China and thus have been a kind of test-case for China’s handling of foreign aspirants ever since the community popped up a decade or so ago. I wrote about that neighborhood in the magazine in 2009; at the time, the Africans complained that they were subject to intense scrutiny, and were frequently jailed and deported for immigration violations. Recently, China embarked on a “hundred-day crackdown” against those working and staying in the country illegally, and people are now advised to carry a passport in case of random checks. The issue will only grow in coming years, as more and more foreigners seek to settle in China for more than a few months or years. Chinese officials are now reviewing the nation’s first-ever immigration law, which will determine what kinds of workers can stay, for how long, and for what kinds of jobs. (Among the details one hopes do not pass: a plan to collect “biological data,” whatever that means, to keep track of new arrivals.)

But the tensions in the Nigerian community, and the “hundred-day crackdown,” should not obscure the fact that, in many ways, China is a promising place to be for a foreigner who arrives in search of education or opportunity. With some exceptions, visas are plentiful, unemployment is low, and it’s arguably easier to be an American working illegally in China than in Europe. China has no Tea Party arguing that these people are taking anything away from Chinese job-seekers, and Chinese policymakers are acutely aware of the value that foreign ideas pose to stimulating innovation. They are unlikely to do anything that closes off that pathway of new ideas.

Curiously, China’s late arrival to the question of immigration may be to its advantage: if China can follow the learning curve on immigration as fast as it has on other things, and begin to provide university and employment opportunities to the best minds from around the world, it just may take a page from our history and become a destination for talented young aspirants who once imagined that they would make their lives in the United States. If America won’t have them, China just might.

On “This American Life” this week, I have a piece about Americans in China that examines what China thinks of foreigners, and what it feels like to make a home in a nation that is, at turns, thrilling and unnerving.

Photograph by Imaginechina/AP Photo.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.